It has been reported that the Fedora 18 installer may not correctly recognize disks formatted by the Solaris 10 installer: it may see partitions on these disks as free (unformatted) space. This may be due to the Solaris 10 installer using an unusual GPT format. If you have disks formatted by the Solaris installer that contain data of value to you, exercise caution in installing Fedora 18. See the bug report for more details.

It has been reported that the Fedora 18 installer may not correctly recognize disks formatted by the Solaris 10 installer: it may see partitions on these disks as free (unformatted) space. This may be due to the Solaris 10 installer using an unusual GPT format. If you have disks formatted by the Solaris installer that contain data of value to you, exercise caution in installing Fedora 18. See the bug report for more details.

Testing indicates that the Fedora 18 installer may crash if you attempt an install to a system containing two or more identically named LVM volume groups (VGs) - even if you choose to delete one or both as part of the installation process.

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If you are affected by this problem, there are several possible workarounds. Most simply, if you only need to install to one of the disks containing identically-named VGs, you can leave the other disk(s) out of the installation target disk set (selected on the first page of the Installation Destination spoke), or temporarily remove the other disk(s) from the system. If you need to keep the offending disks connected and use them as installation targets, you will need to remove or rename one of the VGs using another tool before beginning the Fedora installation.

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Revision as of 00:50, 15 January 2013

This page documents common bugs in Fedora 18 and, if available, fixes or workarounds for these problems. If you find your problem in this page, do not file a bug for it, unless otherwise instructed. Where appropriate, a reference to the current bug(s) in Bugzilla is included.

Release Notes

My bug is not listed

Not every bug is listed in this page, but Bugzilla should be a comprehensive database of known bugs. This page is a sampling of the bugs most commonly discussed on our mailing lists and forums.

To see if your bug has already been reported, you can search Bugzilla. If it has not yet been reported, we encourage you to do so to help improve Fedora for yourself and others. A guide to Bugs and feature requests has been prepared to assist you.

If you believe an already-reported bug report should be added to this page because it is commonly encountered, you can:

Add it yourself, if you have wiki access. Please follow the style and guidelines explained in the comments in the page source.

Or, add the CommonBugs keyword to the bug report. Someone from the QA team will then inspect the issue to determine whether the bug should be listed as a common bug. To expedite your request, please add a comment to the bug that includes

a summary of the problem

any known workarounds

an assessment on the impact to Fedora users

For reference, you can query Bugzilla for bugs tagged CommonBugs:

CommonBugs? (bugs with CommonBugs keyword, but do not yet have a link to this page)

CommonBugs+(bugs with CommonBugs keyword and contain a link to this page)

Installation issues

Installer crashes if you need a network installation and have a local kickstart and a slow network card

If you perform a kickstarted network installation and serve the kickstart locally (from a local partition, not from online location) on a machine with a slow network card, the installer will crash if it starts earlier than the network is set up.

The solution is to serve the kickstart from an online location. That will set up the network very early in the boot process, before the installer is started.

If you boot the network installation image (netinst.iso) on a machine with just a wireless network connection, or a very slow wired network card, the installer will say Nothing selected below the Installation source icon and it will be marked as a problematic state (see screenshot). However, just opening the Installation Source dialog and ensuring that Closest Mirror is selected doesn't help. You need to manually trigger metadata refresh by first changing the network source to e.g. http://abc (hit Done), and only then switching it back to Closest Mirror.

Media consistency check can't be skipped, its output is unhelpful

The installation medium is checked for errors during boot be default. The consistency check says Press [Esc] to abort check., but if you try to skip it, lots of errors are printed and you end up in an emergency mode. Use reboot command or hard-reset the machine. It is recommended to let the consistency check finish, but if you really want to skip it, boot the installer using Install Fedora menu item instead of Test this media & install Fedora.

If your media is corrupted, you will also receive lots of cryptic messages and end up in an emergency mode. The output will contain It is not recommended to use this media somewhere in the middle (see screenshot). The flood of error messages might be confusing, but the main message is clear - your media was either corrupted in the download process (check its checksum) or in the burning process (try to burn it again).

Text installation sets POSIX locale

If you perform the installation in the text mode, the system will have a POSIX locale enabled by default. That can break some programs that expect unicode-enabled environment. You can change the default locale after installation by editing /etc/locale.conf and setting LANG="en_US.UTF-8" (or other locale).

Installer crashes after selecting "Malay (Malaysia)" language

If you boot the installer and select Malay (Malaysia) at the language selection screen, the installer crashes immediately after clicking the Continue button. The work-around is to start the installer in English and add Malaysian keymap manually (if you need it). In the installed system you can then change the default language using graphical configuration tools in your desktop environment or by editing /etc/locale.conf. The Malaysian translation of the Fedora 18 installer is in any case very very incomplete, so in practice you would need to be able to read English to install anyway. We apologize to Malaysian-speaking users for this error.

Partitions on Solaris 10-formatted disks may appear as free space to installer

It has been reported that the Fedora 18 installer may not correctly recognize disks formatted by the Solaris 10 installer: it may see partitions on these disks as free (unformatted) space. This may be due to the Solaris 10 installer using an unusual GPT format. If you have disks formatted by the Solaris installer that contain data of value to you, exercise caution in installing Fedora 18. See the bug report for more details.

Testing indicates that the Fedora 18 installer may crash if you attempt an install to a system containing two or more identically named LVM volume groups (VGs) - even if you choose to delete one or both as part of the installation process.

If you are affected by this problem, there are several possible workarounds. Most simply, if you only need to install to one of the disks containing identically-named VGs, you can leave the other disk(s) out of the installation target disk set (selected on the first page of the Installation Destination spoke), or temporarily remove the other disk(s) from the system. If you need to keep the offending disks connected and use them as installation targets, you will need to remove or rename one of the VGs using another tool before beginning the Fedora installation.

Installer boot options documentation is outdated

There are currently two pages documenting the boot options of the installer of Fedora 18 Beta: Anaconda Boot Options and http://wwoods.fedorapeople.org/doc/boot-options.html. Both of them are at least partly outdated. We are hoping to update these pages soon, but in the mean time you can try to look at both and take a guess which of the boot options are current and which are obsolete, if you need to use them. Of course, if you are able to follow the source code, you can check out the anaconda source and derive the currently-valid options from that.

Some old anaconda options - notably, several of the network configuration options - have been replaced by Dracut options, which are documented at Dracut/Options.

Keyboard layout testing and selection during installation does not work as expected

On the Keyboard screen during Fedora 18 installation there is a text entry box labelled 'Test the selected layout below:'. This label is confusing. The box does not let you test the layout currently highlighted in the list on the left hand side of the screen, but the layout that is active. There is no indicator for the active layout, so it is not easy to know which layout is active. The layout that was in the list when you first entered the screen will stay active until you do one of two things: remove it, or configure a layout switch key combination and use it. So if the English (U.S.) layout was in the list when you first entered the screen, if you add the French (French) layout, it will not be active. If you highlight it in the list, it will not be active. If you move it to the top of the list, it will still not be active. But if you remove the English (U.S.) layout, French (French) will become the active layout. Alternatively, if you add French (French), then click the 'Options' button, pick one or more keyboard layout switch combination(s), click 'OK', and then press a layout switch combination you just configured, French (French) will become active: press it again, and English (U.S.) will be active again. This should be reflected in the test box.

As there is no indication of the current active layout throughout installation, if you are configuring multiple layouts, we recommend you ensure the layout you wish to use for the rest of the install process is active using the test box before leaving the Keyboard screen, and then do not switch layouts until installation is complete.

Installation source shows 'Nothing selected' for network installation

It is possible that the Fedora 18 installer may fail to correctly set the default remote package source on occasion when booting the network installation image. Instead of showing 'Closest mirror' and 'GNOME Desktop', the 'Installation Source' and 'Software Selection' entries on the installer hub/home screen will show 'Nothing selected'. This will prevent installation from starting until it is rectified. Several possible causes of this bug were eliminated during development of Fedora 18, but it appears the bug may still occur in some rare cases.

If you are affected by this bug, to work around it, you can either just reboot (it will often succeed on a second try), or enter the 'Installation Source' spoke, change the remote source URL to any specific address at all (it does not have to be valid), return to the hub screen, return to the 'Installation Source' spoke, change the source back to 'Closest mirror', and return to the hub screen once again.

Installer can become apparently 'stuck' in custom partitioning mode due to window focus problems

Occasionally, the Fedora 18 installer can become apparently 'stuck' in custom partitioning mode, after opening several subsidiary dialogs. The typical manifestation of this bug is that you hit the button to add a new mount point or to change the properties of a mount point, the subsidiary dialog does not appear, and the installer seems to stop responding: the cursor will still move and change shape depending on what it is hovering over, but clicks will appear to have no effect.

This is a window focus problem - the dialog has in fact appeared, but is behind the main anaconda window but still focused and taking all mouse/keyboard input. The issue can be resolved quite simply by pressing the Esc key, which will close the rogue dialog. This will restore normal behaviour. The bug has no further consequences.

DVD install does not include LibreOffice by default

Though it has historically been part of the default Fedora package set, the LibreOffice office suite is not included in a default DVD or network installation of Fedora 18 (it is included in the Desktop live image installation, though, where it was not before). This is partly an oversight and partly due to technical limitations which prevented it being included by default but de-selectable for those users who do not want it.

If you wish to have LibreOffice installed as part of your DVD or network installation, make sure to enter the Software Selection screen and check the LibreOffice option on the right-hand side.

Installer no longer attempts to infer whether hardware clock is set to local time or UTC, or allows you to configure this

In previous Fedora releases, the installer offered a configuration option to specify whether the system's hardware clock was set to local time or to UTC. It would also attempt to guess the correct setting, defaulting to 'local time' if a Windows installation was found, or UTC if not (these are the most likely cases). In Fedora 18, the configuration option is no longer present, and the heuristic to try and determine the most likely case was also lost.

The most likely consequence of this bug is that, if you do have a Windows installation, your system clock will be incorrect every time you switch operating system, as Windows will expect it to be set to local time, but Fedora will expect it to be set to UTC.

The configuration option was removed intentionally as it was considered confusing, but the removal of the heuristic was not intentional. It will be restored in future Fedora releases. You can change this setting after installation using the system-config-date utility.

Croatian keyboard layout missing from installer

The Fedora 18 installer's Keyboard spoke is intended to offer all Xkb keyboard layouts present in Fedora, but testing has shown that the Croatian layout and its variants are missing from the list. These layouts are available for selection via desktop keyboard configuration tools after installation. We have not yet identified why the installer does not recognize these layouts as being available, but we will aim to resolve the issue for future Fedora releases.

UEFI boot doesn't work with liveusb-creator

liveusb-creator is one of the recommended tools for converting optical media ISO images into a bootable USB images. However, this tool still hasn't implemented support for UEFI boot. If you want to install Fedora in native UEFI mode from a USB media, use either dd or livecd-iso-to-disk to create it. The full instructions are at How to create and use Live USB.

Quitting advanced user creation tool during firstboot quits firstboot

On first boot after installing Fedora 18 (and any Fedora release), a small utility called 'firstboot' is run, which allows you to create a user account and configure a few other options. When creating a user account, there is an option to run an 'advanced' tool for creating more complex accounts. This option actually runs the external application system-config-users. If you then quit this application by opening the File menu and clicking on Quit, it will close the whole firstboot process and proceed immediately to the login screen. If you instead close the application by hitting the X at the corner of the window, the firstboot process will continue.

Testing shows that any user accounts you created in the 'advanced' tool will exist and function correctly even if you hit this bug, and the only subsequent step in the firstboot tool is network time configuration, which you can do from desktop configuration tools at any time, so the impact of this bug is not very high. If you run into it, do not worry: you can safely use the installed system.

Hardware issues

Software issues

Automatic login does not work on Desktop Live image

When you boot the Fedora 18 Desktop Live image, you will not be automatically logged in to the desktop, as was the case in previous releases and as is intended. The login screen will appear with 'Live System User' as the only available user account: clicking this user will log you into the live system, which will then work as usual. There are no further consequences of this bug beyond the minor inconvenience.

System will drop to rescue mode if encryption password not entered after some time

If you install Fedora 18 with all or some system partitions encrypted, then if you do not enter the encryption password for an encryption partition when prompted at boot, after several minutes the system will drop to rescue mode. It ought to wait indefinitely for password entry. If you encounter this problem, you can simply reboot from the rescue mode and enter the password in time on the next boot attempt. Your data will not be endangered.

GNOME does not have a default keyboard shortcut for switching keyboard layout, does not respect the X layout switch shortcut configuration, and cannot configure modifier-only shortcuts

The version of the GNOME desktop installed in Fedora 18 does not include a default keyboard shortcut for switching between multiple keyboard layouts, though you can do so graphically via the menu in the top-right hand corner of the screen. The GNOME Control Center's Keyboard utility lets you configure shortcuts for 'Switch to next source' and 'Switch to previous source', but does not allow these to consist entirely of so-called 'modifier' keys, which is the most common type of shortcut to use for this function. Also, if you configure a layout switch shortcut at the X level either manually or via the Fedora system installer (which is capable of configuring a keyboard layout switch shortcut), GNOME will not respect it.

To work around these problems, you can use the gnome-tweak-tool utility. If you do not have it installed, install it with PackageKit or the command su -c 'yum install gnome-tweak-tool'. Then run it - it is present in the Overview under the name Tweak Tool - and click on Typing. The very last setting in this menu, 'Modifiers-only input sources switcher shortcut', lets you choose one of several commonly-used shortcuts for this purpose.

Virtual terminals are not put into the unicode mode, breaking non-ASCII characters

If you switch to a virtual terminal (using Ctrl+Alt+Fx), and run some commands, some non-ASCII characters might be displayed incorrectly (mangled). The issue is still being investigated, but running unicode_start beforehand seems to fix the issue for that particular terminal. This does not affect graphical terminals, like GNOME Terminal.